It’s akin to a corporation manager letting her perfectly serviceable company car sit in the parking lot while she leases one at three times the going rate from her best friend. This while planning to requisition an additional company car to sit unused in the parking lot beside the existing one while still continuing the lease.

Significantly reducing reliance on independent power producers would save utility hundreds of millions of dollars

BC Hydro president Dave Cobb has told his staff that he expects Victoria to soon abandon its current energy selfsufficiency policy, a move that would free Hydro from buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of electricity that it doesn’t need from independent power producers.

Cobb made the prediction on a private conference call with Hydro staff on Aug. 12, one day after a government-appointed panel released a report slamming Hydro for its bloated staff and high wages and calling for Hydro to cut its planned rate increases in half. On the call, Cobb argued that the B.C. Liberal government’s 2007 energy plan, which requires Hydro to have enough energy on hand by 2016 to be self-sufficient, is enormously costly to the utility.

“If it doesn’t change, it would be hundreds of millions of dollars per year that we would be spending of our ratepayers’ money with no value in return,” said Cobb. “The way the self-sufficiency policy is defined now … would require us to buy far more long-term power than we need.”

Christy Clark”s (best friend forever) Justin Trudeau is hinting that he’d like to sell off the Port of Vancouver for $22 Billion to “have cash for infrastructure”. Imagine the power and energy produced by these two politicians rubbing their hands together for cash kick-backs.

It will provide cash for the lawsuits against those fighting the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

Cash for the imaginary “World Class Response” clean up of bitumen oil spills.

Marine Parking Lots for supersized LNG waiting for Squamish LNG.

China will buy the Port of Vancouver.

China will claim “interference of profits” if protesters delay the Site C Dam project, LNG or oil pipelines.

China’s Anbang Insurance bought Retirement Concepts in excess of $1 Billion. This is Christy Clark’s biggest Real Estate sale. Retirement Concepts will be the murky retirement home for all political dissents and protesters. (Watch out for the wire brush on bath days.)

China will be allowed to invest in the greasy spoon robotic technology for the Oilsands of Alberta.

The Chinese government has bought Montreal’s ITF Technologies. This Montreal firm has “weapons capacity”.

Soon, all of Canada’s: Resources, Intelligence and Politicians will be available for purchase at a drive-thru kiosk near you.

Retirement Concepts sale was never mentioned in the Sun or Prv,, just the Globe & Mail. So it went through. We are living in dangerous times. Only a few people know this information. Goebles would be envious.

“Chinese investigators who detained Wu Xiaohui, chairman of Anbang Insurance Group, are carrying out a wide probe that includes looking into the sources of funding for the firm’s acquisitions overseas, possible market manipulation by insurers, and “economic crimes,” people familiar with the matter said.”

The above quote is about Anbang, which recently purchased 22 retirement homes in BC.
Great, huh.

“The Trudeau government’s point man on foreign takeovers said he’s disturbed by news that the chair of Chinese conglomerate Anbang has been arrested by Beijing, but he will not reconsider Ottawa’s decision to allow the insurance titan to buy a stake in British Columbia’s health-care sector.

Earlier this year, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains green-lighted the sale of one of British Columbia’s biggest retirement-home chains to Anbang, an insurance-holding company with a murky ownership structure, in a deal that gave China a foothold in Canada’s health-care sector.

The deal – believed to be worth in excess of $1-billion – gave Anbang control of Vancouver-based Retirement Concepts, which is B.C.’s highest-billing provider of assisted-living and residential-care services. The B.C. government paid Retirement Concepts $86.5-million in the 2015-16 fiscal year, more than any other of the 130 similar providers.”

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The BC Business Party told many contemptuous lies during its tenure but ones involving LNG were the largest. The captured corporate media crew in BC's Legislative Press Gallery facilitated Liberal untruthfulness by failing to look behind or beyond government press releases. Attentive research would have convinced any objective researcher that government […]

In the May 2017 election, only two of the main parties committed to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. BC Liberals were uncomfortable with clauses related to informed consent that would interfere with business of their corporate donors. John Horgan's NDP Government and Andrew Weaver's Green Party committed to a diff […]

With news the BC Ferries vessel Spirit of British Columbia is about to sail to Europe for an extensive refit, I bump this article back to the top. - In October 2015, the Commissioner approved $173 million for the project but, as evidenced by the confidential order three months later, increased the approved amount by $46 million to $219 million. Instead of fi […]

Brady Yauch is an economist at the Consumer Policy Institute (CPI), which identifies itself as “an independent think-tank dedicated to achieving lower costs and greater efficiencies for Canadian consumers, particularly in sectors run by government monopolies or those receiving large subsidies.” Mr. Yauch published a powerful examination of mismanagement at u […]

In modern times, the Canadian union movement has lost influence but not relevance. It is easy to forget that unions enabled a broad middle class. Workers in unionized company towns in BC’s 20th century resource economy set the bar for others. They showed how positive full employment with good wages enables high quality life for the entire community.

When Encana's founding CEO Gwyn Morgan became Christy Clark's transition team advisor, natural gas producers knew they'd bet on a good thing. After six years of Clark, we now see just how good that thing was for gas companies.

When a new government takes office, there is often a significant change at senior levels of the civil service and among OIC political appointments. One person still employed by the Horgan government may surprise more than a few people.

I'm hopeful that writers and readers in the online world of BC politics will find a suitable way to remember and celebrate Merv Adey. He took a serious interest in improving political reporting and perhaps a bursary or award in Merv's name to a worthy student of journalism would be appropriate. Let me know if you agree.

When British Columbia conducts LNG negotiations behind closed doors, without public statements of principles or bargaining frameworks, citizens should worry. I have written about our government's willingness to provide the gas industry with 9-figure production subsidies and Liberal aversion to collection of natural gas royalties but there is another sub […]

Muskrat Falls was always a done deal, and a bad one says Pam Frampton, Saint John’s Telegram. "One week the project was all about clean energy, the next it was job creation, then it was all about being an affordable energy source, then it was a means of foiling Quebec, then it was a lure for mining companies.” The Progressive Conservatives’ sales pitch […]